Now this is interesting. We only briefly touched upon Qubes two months ago, and now, the team behind the project have announced a very interesting feature: disposable virtual machines. The idea here is that you can tell your operating system to launch an application in a virtual machine that gets created specifically for opening that application. If you close the application, the VM is destroyed automatically - and this all in under one second.

How does this differ from being a normal OS except with highly restricted interprocess communication? It seems like nothing more than a OS that takes processes partitioning all the way down to the filesystem level.

Well, if you really want to call it a distribution, then we’re more of a “Xen distribution”, rather then a Linux one. But Qubes is much more than just Xen packaging -- it has its own VM management infrastructure, with support for template VMs, centralized VM updating, etc, and also its very unique GUI virtualization infrastructure.

It is more than just restricted IPC. The entire file system, including any changes made to it are gone as soon as the application is done. Kind if like incognito mode taken to extremes. I used to use this a lot with testing Windows install programs. I used a snapshot VM that I could apply the changes or roll them back when I shut it down. It was very good for testing that my installer did not break the registry.